Pat and I got off the bus in Sao Paulo (the song said a
van but that was just for the rhyme) and walked swiftly away from the
station. We were sure that Interpol was hot on our tail, Interpol or the
army, or police. We didn't have
much money so we naturally found our way to the lowest level, a
neighborhood with women standing next to buildings and calling out, "Fucky,
fucky?" as we passed by. "No thank you," we'd respond. We got a room in a
cheap hotel. Breakfast was included. I can't remember anything about Sao
Paolo except that it was huge and that we ate breakfast with a table of
women much like the ones who'd called out "Fucky, fucky." Except now we
were not prospective Johns but neighbors so we got to experience each
other in a less commercial way more wholesome way.

It was not my first experience of hanging out with Latin prostitutes.
In Mexico City, I'd frequently find myself late at night in a warehouse
full of friendly young women who wanted to take me into little partitioned
rooms behind curtains. There was booze and live music. The mariachis would
share a guitar with me and I'd sing anything that came to mind - Elvis,
fifties rhythm and blues, my version of Cuando Caliente El Sol, stuff I'd
make up on the spot. Women would sit by me and put their hands on my
thighs and bring me drinks. I would serenade them but not consummate the
relationships. It was about the time I turned twenty and I had only had
one experience of sexual intercourse with a woman, a woman more than ten
years older, someone I knew, on the way to Mexico that January. I had enjoyed that very
much indeed but didn't aggressively pursue such intimacy.

Back then I was with my friend Jeff whom I first went to Mexico with, who had
been there before and knew some Spanish, my first mentor to all things
Mexican. Jeff and I had been living for a month in San Miguel de Allende
before going to the Distrito Federal (Federal District, Mexico City). He's
the one who introduced me to the whore houses and seedy side of the city.
I remember sitting with him and some Mexican guys in an alley smoking pot
at night and Jeff pointing out that the name of the street off the alley
was "Street of the Cutthroat." It did seem like that type of place.
Anyway, Jeff had paid to have sex with a young woman and had immediately
fallen in love with her. We returned the next night - not to the same
place - the venues were always changing because prostitution was illegal
in the city limits - not illegal in a lot of other
places outside the city. Just have to ask around, taxi drivers were best. It didn't make sense to me that they'd move
the locale around to escape detection because there were always police in there. And on the night that we returned so that
Jeff could find his new love, two police threatened to arrest us if we
didn't give them money, more than we could afford. Up to that point
Jeff had done all the talking but he couldn't talk then because he was
prone to tragic Beat existential psychosis to begin with and was distraught to the extent
of delirium that the woman of his dreams was behind a curtain having
filthy sex with another filthy stranger rather than the pure and beautiful
love making he'd experienced with her. I'd been studying Spanish
constantly and suddenly for the first time it flowed out of me under
duress. I asked what we were doing that demanded a fine. They said
it was illegal for us to be in this house of disrepute. I countered that
it was illegal for anyone to be here and they (actually one of them)
retorted yes, but it was more illegal for us since we were minors. I was
indignant. I told the officers of the law that it was not right for them
to hassle us, that we weren't like the rich capitalist gringos living up
in Lomas and lording it over the common people, exploiting them and so
forth, no, we were there with the common people not only in the night but
in the day. We were one with them, unified, their problems our problems,
their dreams our dreams. The policemen laughed, said they were just
kidding, and walked off.

After Sao Paolo, Pat and I hitchhiked further south still wondering if
we were the objects of a manhunt, menhunt. One test of that theory came
when we slept at a police station. That was something I'd learned to do
when hitching in the States. After we were already there Pat asked aren't
we trying to avoid police and I said, oh yeah, I forgot. But they didn't
seem to suspect us of anything. I don't remember where this was but I know I
was wrong when I said I'd finished off the Panama Red back in Rio, because
we still had some of it in my backpack. I used
that backpack as a pillow while we slept in a room with a dozen policemen
- all of us on thin mats on the floor quite close together not far from
cells where people with contraband or fleeing prosecution for contraband could be held.

There were truck stops along the way south` where a trucker we'd hitched
with bought us huge, sprawling meals. There's be steaks
and potatoes, bread, lots of side vegetable dishes and other types of
meat, fruit, coffee and desserts. Pat and I split these meals and could
hardly finish them. The trucker went upstairs with a woman after dinner.
We stayed in the truck and the next morning we took turns taking cold
outdoor showers. It was July, mid-winter, at some altitude like two
thousand feet, maybe thirty-five degrees. A man on the side of the road
was roasting pine nuts under tall pine trees, a bag for a dime or so.
Cheap, roasted pine nuts - ahhh. The trucker left
us at an obscure intersection and went off into the distance on a side
road. What great
luck we'd had. We stood at that spot for forty-eight hours, a vehicle
going by every hour or two.

We spent a week in a small town named Pelotas (balls). There we stayed
with a couple of families and made friends with high school kids, played baseball with
them, read with them at night. There were two Mormons stationed there,
young guys who were converting teenagers and teaching them
how to call black people niggers. The missionaries asked Pat and me to pay
them a visit. They spent the time trying to convert us. We told them that
what they were selling was a bunch of baloney and got mad
at them for the negative way they were influencing the youth in the town.
Later the kids asked us please not to criticize the missionaries
or cause trouble because they were the ticket out - to America, to
college. Time to go.

Uruguay was experiencing extreme deflation. We got a room in a nice
hotel in Montevideo for something ridiculous. Pat bought a leather jacket
for a dollar. We bought sixty-five bottles of Dexedrine for eight cents
each. We ate steak every meal. That was his trip. I grew up in steak
country and never was into eating lots of steak but joined in on it at
that time. We'd get steak and eggs for breakfast, steak and salad for
lunch, steak and potatoes for dinner. Everything was so cheap we didn't
notice that we were running low on money until it was all gone - after
four days. We told the hotel we'd wired for money and would pay when it
came. It took a week. We walked around waiting for it, went to the bank
asking about it, went to the Embassy for help but they were into helping
businessmen, pleaded with the hotel management not to kick us out, walked
around more. We had to walk around because we had to meet people who would
feed us. We'd run into some US tourists and be friendly, inquire about
their trip and where were they from, not act desperate and begging but would
let slip what our situation was and would say we hadn't eaten in five days
even though we didn't miss many meals, maybe some breakfasts. Not always
US tourists. Sometimes Europeans - and Pat spoke some French which was
helpful a few times. Sometimes locals. If we got too hungry
we'd take some of the Dexedrine, commonly used as diet pills worldwide.
All day we'd walk around, talk our way into museums for free, sit in
parks. My favorite memory of Montevideo is that of sitting on a park bench
when a man wearing a monocle, German Sheppard on leash, walked up. We
talked for a while. He said he'd been there since 1945. Although he had a
heavy German accent he said he was Portuguese. Got a free cab ride from a German who'd
been there since 1946. He'd been in a US POW camp and had been treated
well, tried to stay, but they wouldn't let him so he went to Uruguay. At
night Pat would read to me from Lawrence Durrell's sad and dreamy
Alexandria Quartet.

On the same day the money finally arrived the hotel staff had
confiscated our backpacks and toothbrushes and so forth which saved us the
trouble of packing and carrying stuff down from the second floor. With our newly
arrived wealth, I fetched the Leica Camera, collateral that had been my
father's, from a kindly bus driver who'd driven us there from Pelotas when
we didn't want to hitch but also didn't want to pay for the bus till
later. That was flexible of him. That was almost the only use that
expensive camera was put to other than be a source of worry. Never
traveled with a camera again.

We were off to Buenos Aires, flying a few feet above the water across
the estuary Rio de La Plata (river of silver) on a hovercraft. We arrived
in Argentina with enough money left for a few meals.